How to Admit You Don't Know Something

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You're shooting the shit with your buddy, and he turns to you, and he says, "Hey, do you know..." about some unheralded Socrates understudy or some sub-underground rapper with three punctuation marks in his name or some other thing that you don't know a damned thing about. But you, not wanting to look like an out-of-the-know ass, respond, "Yeah, great stuff." Or some derivative. But the form of the reply remains the same no matter the topic: First, you agree ("Yeah" or "Of course"). Then you dig into that adjective to give it some weight — to emote the heft of your actually nonexistent opinion. Great. "Love him." And then maybe you close with some platitudinal, inarguable improvisation at the end: "But still not as smart as Socrates himself."

Your ignorance is camouflaged; your pride, preserved.

Unless, of course, the person you're shooting the shit with is a guy with a camera and a microphone. And the person he just asked you about doesn't exist.

Take for example what Jimmy Kimmel's correspondent did a few nights ago to these oblivious Coachella-goers, asking how excited they were to see bands with made-up names, like the Obesity Epidemic and Get the Fk Out of My Pool:

Or this man yesterday, at the NFL Draft, inspired by Kimmel to ask jersey-wearing, boo-Goodell fans what they thought of imaginary players, like Calvin Johnson's brother, Curvin:

Gentlemen, we have a problem in need of fixing. We need to learn how to admit when we don't know something. Because there's a lot we don't know. About music and sports and books and politics and relatives. About women. Because there's just too little room upstairs to remember John Stockton's pick number in the '84 NBA draft class, the entirety of Pablo Neruda's "A Dog Has Despaired," and the tracklist for the early Grandmaster Flash album, Chicka-Unh-Pow*, on top of our parents-in-laws' ages.

The problem is that at the moment there's a disproportionate amount of supposed social cachet behind knowledge. Usually trivia, too. Yeah, sure, knowledge is, as the cliché sings, power; or, put another way, a smart ass is better than a dumb one. But there's no need to feel emasculated because you're not Ken Jennings. Besides, there's a way to control that flow of power.

Here's how to admit that you don't know something without feeling like you're a worthless sack of flab. Two steps. Admission: Man up and say, "No, I haven't heard of that." No real inflection needed. Just plain. Loose, even. Probably better to keep it loose. And then, the crucial part: Ask a question, even as simple as, "What's his deal?" That simple. Because now you're questioning their knowledge. Now you're in the position of Evaluator of Intelligence. And more importantly than all that machismo-power junk, now you're interested, and you're learning.

Because "To know is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge," as Socrates said. Or maybe that was Confucius. Who knows.